It appears the NFL one day will seriously consider taking the “foot” out of its sport and just play “ball.” The NBL, National Ball League. They’re over-tinkering this game.

Our minds can get clouded by so many statistics. But the best stat I heard in 2014 was that NFL kickers representing 32 teams missed five extra points (four of them blocked) out of 1,200-something extra points, while San Diego State’s marksmen missed six by themselves.

Still, just because the Aztecs have all but done away with the point-after doesn’t mean The League has to abolish it, or push it back to a 43-yard try. But it’s sure to come up at the owners’ meetings beginning March 23 in Orlando.

I’m thinking there’s going to be a change, but I’m tired of Commissioner Roger Goodell and his merry band of tinkers constantly trying to remodel what is, by far, the most successful enterprise in the history of sports. What is it about “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” Rog doesn’t understand?

True, extra points have all but become automatic in the NFL. So what? They’re part of the game as we’ve known it. And it’s also true that kickers drive me nuts. But they’re necessary. They can lose games, important games (see: Kaeding, Nate), but probably win most of them. New England won all three of its Super Bowls by 3 points apiece.

If they move the point-after to a 43-yard try, Adam Vinatieri, who kicked when the Patriots won those championships, sees a league turning its back on the safety it’s been promoting. Isn’t Goodell’s whole thing, other than the ridiculous notion of moving a team to London, about player health?

“I don’t understand the logic,” says Vinatieri, the greatest of all kickers, now with the Colts. “Will it make the game safer by moving the extra point back to a 43-yarder? If you want to talk about potential risk, more guys get injured on a field goal than an extra point.”

Kickers have time to think.

Nick Novak, who has a job with the Chargers because he’s an excellent bootsman, isn’t going to throw a kick-fit over a rules change. But he does have an interesting idea -- if, indeed, The League is looking for a change, which it obviously is.

“I’ve always been a guy who doesn’t worry about things he can’t control,” Novak says. “But we kick through narrower poles during practice, so when we get to a game the distance between the poles look huge. I don’t know if the NFL is looking to make it more difficult on us (it is), but narrowing the poles would be a solution. It would make it more difficult, if that’s what the NFL is looking for.

“Guys are so good now. I don’t mind if they move it back from the 3 to the 25. It’s still a short field goal to me. If they narrowed the poles and made a 50-yard-plus field goal worth four points (an old NFL Europe experiment in which Novak participated in Cologne), that might work, too. They should try it in the preseason.”